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Zombies are people, too... Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.
-- USA Network commercial for Night of the Living Dead
Zombies are people, who, by no fault of their own, were infected by a virus that made them into flesh-eating cannibals. This makes it okay to kill them.
-- Infected game manual
Subtrope of Our Monsters Are Different.
Within the past couple days or hours, something very strange has happened. Maybe The Virus the government was working on got unleashed. Maybe a voodoo priest's spell went awry. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth; or fell to Earth bringing space radiation with it.
Either way, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.
The word "zombie" originated in the Voudon beliefs of the Caribbean, referring to a body "revived" and enslaved by a sorcerer. (Some of the oldest aspects of zombie appearance are actually symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning, a neuron toxin used in certain voudon rituals.) In this form, it has been known in America since the late 19th century. However, it wasn't until the 1960s that George Romero's Night of the Living Dead attached the word to the modern imagery described above.
As Night was accidentally entered into the public domain due to an error in the end credits, it quickly became the object of imitation and emulation by many other directors. Most zombie invasion stories, even those not explicitly based on Romero's films, follow the same conventions, though there are major points of contention. While Romero is responsible for most of the "general" zombie conventions, the more specific and visible zombie tropes are more often inspired by the later works of John Russo, Night's co-writer. Most zombie movies mix-and-match conventions from the Romero and Russo canons.
The classic "Romero Rules" for zombies include:
- Whatever the cause of zombiism, the effect is pandemic; anyone who dies arises moments later as a zombie, whatever the cause of death, unless they suffer damage to the brain.
- The bite of a zombie is infectious, and is always a fatal injury, even if it seems a trivial scratch. This results in the victim returning as a zombie, much to the horror of the Zombie Infectee, though this is essentially coincidental, as zombification would equally result had the infectee died of, say, rabies. This rule is probably the source of the confusion between the first rules of the Romero and Russo rule sets.
- Zombies are slow-moving, lumbering, and stupid. Subversions of this have only recently appeared, but are increasingly common. In the Romero canon, it is a recurring theme that zombies become cleverer as time passes.
- Zombies are not significantly stronger than humans, though they are not disadvantaged by injury as humans are.
- It is generally the case that a single zombie is not a tremendous threat, owning largely to the previous two rules. The threat of zombies generally stems from the fact that they tend to turn up in mobs.
- Zombies can be killed only by destroying their brains (or destroying their entire body, as by immolation, which results in the same thing), though rendering them immobile is usually taken to be just as good.
- In the Zombie Surival Guide Max Brooks points out that since zombies can't feel pain a burning zombie will simply keep moving around (and setting other stuff on fire) until they become imobile.
- Zombies are compelled to eat the flesh of the living.
The "Russo Rules" are similar, but include several specific differences:
- Zombiism is The Virus. Zombiism results only from being bitten by another zombie, though event zero created the first zombie that starts off the chain reaction. Most non-Romero zombie films prefer this convention to Romero's, including the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
- A zombie bite results in zombification, though the transition is slow, with the victim becoming progressively more zombie-like. Zombies become stupider and less human over time, presumably as their brains decompose. A "recent" zombie may be able to suppress his monstrous tendencies for a time.
- Zombies are stronger than humans, though they remain slow-moving. Zombies are nigh-impossible to destroy, being vulnerable to damage to the brain as above, and immolation -- though this can also release The Virus.
- Zombies are specifically compelled to eat the brains of living humans. Zombies still possessing the power of speech may begin talking rather obsessively about smelling brains, before their minds deteriorate and leave them saying only, "Brains..."
- They say "brains" because Russo zombies find being dead very painful, and eating brains is the only thing that eases that perpetual agony.
A factor that doesn't really belong to either set of rules is whether a zombie can continue to function underwater. In some examples humans are safe if they are living on remote islands, while in others zombies are able to either walk along the bottom, or at least float with the current and reach any point on the globe. (This is specifically discussed in the novel World War Z, where zombies are somehow able to withstand the crushing pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.)
A variant cosmology has popped up recently, in places like the 28 - Later films. These zombies are not reanimated dead at all, but living people infected with the series' respective pathogens. This version of The Virus can't actually reanimate, only infect.
Another zombie variant that seems to be catching on is the idea of the "fast" zombie. Rather than the slow, lumbering, stupid creatures seen in earlier works, these zombies are able to sprint as fast or faster than normal humans and are much more aggressive, making them a much more immediate threat as now a single zombie has the potential to wreak havoc. "Fast" zombies have appeared in many recent zombie media including 28 Days Later, the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, Resident Evil 4 and Half Life 2.
Zombiism is almost always endemic to humans -- animals are not generally affected in great numbers. This is reasonable under both Romero-style rules (as Zombiism is often has quasi-religious implications such as "Hell being full"), and Russo-style rules (since few viruses can cross species boundaries), though it does avert common tropes about disease. Exceptions do crop up -- Resident Evil, for example, is packed to the brim with mutant zombie animals, but these will never fully take into account the major reason that zombie animals are so rare: it is all but impossible to tell anything like a coherent story while accurately conveying just how totally screwed humans would be under these conditions. Exceptions will have one or two demon dogs, maybe a flock of demon birds. Think a few million zombie humans is bad? It is estimated that in some major cities, rats outnumber humans at least eight to one. And if insects can be zombified, it's time to just lay down and die. Don't worry, it won't stick.
Another variation on the zombie theme would be Voudoun (known in Hollywood parlance as "Voodoo"). Those zombies may simply be mindless shamblers, or they may also be the flesh-eating type.
The improbability of zombie conquest of the earth when they follow these rules, given that the human body, zombified or not, is hardly a particularly effective adversary to modern military techniques and weapons, is almost never addressed. Note, though, that in most of the Russo zombie films, where zombiism is The Virus, the zombie menace is eventually contained. Under Romero rules, the pandemic nature of the effect does something to justify the trope: even in a secure, zombie-free enclave, any unexpected death or nibble can place the community at risk by placing a zombie within their defensive perimeter (as demonstrated in Land of the Dead). 28 Days Later does point out that the "zombies" are not a naturally sustainable population, and survivors need do nothing more than stay alive until the majority of them have starved to death. The Russo rules subvert the concerns about military techniques, as the military techniques usually serve to further the spread of The Virus. In World War Z, it is explained that a number of the most modern weaponry is actually completely ineffective against zombies, and that unlike living soldiers, the undead do not lose morale, which means that they will never falter, break, or retreat from a battle.
Common to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. This makes some sense in stories where the zombies are manipulated by some force intent on attacking humanity, or where they need fresh human meat to survive, but it occurs even in films like 28DaysLater where The Virus is just supposed to make the infected vastly more angry and homicidal than before. Why they never turn on their own is rarely, if ever, addressed. This can be subverted if ordinary humans can avoid being attacked by pretending to be zombies.
One major point of inconstancy and difference of opinion on Zombie rules is how zombies decay. It is generally taken for granted that zombies do not decompose, or decompose at a greatly reduced rate, though there are examples where zombies decompose normally. It is hardly ever the case that zombies will decompose faster than a non-animate corpse, despite the fact that all that moving around should produce a fair bit of wear-and-tear on a body that has no capacity to heal. However, there is a bit of a glaring inconsistancy here, as a film zombie will usually at the moment they rise take on a zombie appearance which invariably resembles the state of decomposition attained by an unpreserved human corpse after several days.
Overwhelmingly, Zombie Apocalypse stories tend to fall into one of two categories of political allegory. The Zombie horror can be used to make a political statement against capitalism and consumerism, with zombies representing the bulk of humanity as unthinking (flesh-eating) sheep (Zombies in the mall, anyone?). The other strain of zombie horror advocates hardcore individualism and libertarianism, again with the zombies as the "unthinking masses", but with an added emphasis on the heroic "well-prepared" survivalist, with Karmic Death to anyone who dares show compassion for others or cares about anything other than their own personal survival. Strangely, though zombies seem to fit the Aliens-As-Communists archetype, pro-capitalist, anti-communist zombie apocalypses are less common -- and anything that would be considered patriotic is right out; the military is never anything but an obstacle at best, more often actively evil.
Often, zombie apocalypse stories are tied with a Science Is Bad message, or an allegory about human nature. (The aforementioned Night contained an allegory for race relations, and its sequel Dawn of the Dead examined American consumerism.) Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species.
The Zombie Apocalypse is so iconic that perfectly sane people will formulate emergency survival plans in case of shambling corpses. There are also survival guides available all over the web and in print.
See also Zombie Gait. Braaaaaaiiiins....
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Although the Reavers of Firefly are most definitely alive and not infectious (in any traditional sense of the word -- though survivors of Reaver attacks are generally driven insane and compelled to imitate the Reavers), in Serenity, they show some clear Zombie Apocalypse influences.
- One might argue that the Reavers are all the bad traits of Western-movie "Injuns", turned up to eleven. Which does make them rather zombie-like, except for the lack of shambling.
- The Borg of Star Trek fame are almost Zombies in space! One guest star even referred to them as 'cybernetic zombies.'
Anime
- An episode of Samurai Champloo was a homage to Russo's work, with an asteroid blowing everyone up ala the nuclear bomb from the movie. This episode had Negative Continuity.
- The manga series, High School of the Dead features a bunch of typical high school anime characters put into a zombie apocalypse, in which everybody who dies and was dead before almost immediately turns into a flesh-eating zombie. On a number of occasions, this manga pays homage to previous zombie movies and games.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Universe comic Marvel Zombies, spun off from Ultimate Fantastic Four, fused this with the Super Hero genre. Zombism in this caused decay and an incredibly powerful craving for non-zombified human flesh. The super-powered ones still kept their powers, and thus tended to do best at eating others; the series starts on a world where they're the only ones left, with no non-zombies left to eat.
- In addition, Marvel Zombies discusses why they do not turn on each other; zombie flesh is singularly unappetizing.
- And flesh imbued with the Power Cosmic is more nourishing to the zombie-ized superheroes.
- Subverted in the Chick tract Dark Dungeons, in which "The Zombie" is apparently a singular creature and therefore unlikely to be able to bring about a proper Zombie Apocalypse. Unless Debbie/Elfstar was playing an early version of Birthright.
Film
- The above-mentioned Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. After Night of the Living Dead the franchise fragmented, courtesy of John Russo doing his own sequel without George Romero's blessing. There have also been a number of unofficial and unlicensed sequels-in-name-only, since a quirk of copyright law put the original film into the public domain.
- Romero's Sequels:
- Dawn of the Dead
- Day of the Dead
- Land of the Dead
- Diary of the Dead
- Russo's sequels:
- Return of the Living Dead
- Return of the Living Dead Part 2
- Return of the Living Dead 3
- Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis
- Return of the Living Dead: Rave from the Grave
- 28 Days Later was a zombie film with non-undead zombies. Unlike the shambling, slow zombies of most films, these ones moved faster than the ordinary human. Also worth noting is that "The Infected" need not bite to infect; The virus can be spread through mere contact with their blood--it has to get into a mucous membrane, but the mouth and eyes will both do.
- The series continued in 28 Weeks Later.
- The Twenty-Eight series inspired the undead running zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead.
- Shaun of the Dead plays the concept for laughs, while at the same time remaining faithful to the style of the Romero films. However, the zombies are not only contained, but become a part of everyday life.
- Shaun of the Dead also hilariously subverts the rule that zombies are mindless monsters bearing no resemblance to the former person, when Shaun's music-hating step-dad, after much zombified effort, manages to turn off a car radio. Also when Shaun's videogame-playing best friend still plays videogames with him. It also includes a Take That against the Twenty-Eight series.
- Brilliantly skewered in the 2006 film Fido, which occurs in an alternate 1950s that is in the heyday of a zombie post-apocalypse; the zombies have been tamed into domestic servitude by a control collar. Billy Connolly plays the titular character, one of the most charismatic shambling corpses ever shown on the big screen. This contributor saw it in a film festival early release, and heartily recommends it.
- Grindhouse: Planet Terror gleefully plays out all the classical zombie tropes in the style of a '70s B Movie.
- The Resident Evil based movie trilogy with Milla Jovanovich is more straight forward survival horror with Milla playing a bit of a Mary Sue.
- Zombie Honeymoon is a quasi-Russo example. The man in question goes from completely sane to mindless flesh eater back and forth over the course of the movie.
- Ring of Darkness is about a Zombie Boyband who were created via voodoo, and are the flesh-eating variety. They score a few hits, then fade out of the public eye for 20 years, then come back as another band.
- Night of the Creeps features the alien entity infection variety, where the victims could either remain sentient or become mindless shamblers looking to continue infecting others.
- It also inspired SLiTHER, retaining elements of the alien parasitic hive-minded worms, and also being a Homage to and an Affectionate Parody of zombie tropes.
- American Werewolf In London had Jack (the best friend of the main character) die and come back as a zombie, and each time he comes back he appears more and more undeadish in appearance. "Have you ever tried talking to a corpse? It's BORING!".
- He's a ghost actually, his appearance is just like his rotting corpse though, and more ghosts show up as more folks die, as part of the curse of the werewolf is being haunted by their victims. Used again in the psuedo-sequel An American Werewolf In Paris.
- The French movie Les revenants (They Came Back in international release) has 70 million people climbing out of their graves... and peacefully returning to their old lives, trying to relearn speech and basic motor functions, and generally not killing anyone.
- Zombie Strippers (No, really), a zombie film set Twenty Minutes Into The Future in which the (still-in-power) Bush Administration creates zombies to act as soldiers in the ongoing wars in Iraq, Iran, Syria, France, Canada and Alaska, but infects the dancers at an illicit strip club. Because the virus preserves the intellect of zombified women (but not men), the eponymous Zombie Strippers are able to keep at their job, and even become better at it (death having freed them of all inhibitions), despite their penchant for eating anyone who ventures into the VIP room. The film is based on Ianesco's absurdist play The Rhinoceroses. I did not make up a single word of this summary.
- Dawn of the Dead (2004) has zombie bite victims begin sickening while still alive, and beginning to take on their zombified appearance before they die. The last thing to change are their eyes which take on an inhuman coloration immediately upon reanimation. The decomposition rate varies by how much damage they took while alive, as Zombies leave other Zombies alone.
Literature
- Richard Matheson's 1954 book I Am Legend, while it was about vampires and not zombies, is an important precursor to the genre. Matheson's novel was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth, a more faithful adaption, and later into The Omega Man, which is a successful zombie story in its own right. The 2007 I Am Legend movie with Wil Smith is the most recent movie adaption.
- Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide is dedicated to zombie attacks. It's a must read for anyone who wants to make a zombie film, although its rules are not quite Romero and not quite Russo. It, in fact, does address how zombies are a particularly effective adversary to modern military techniques and weapons, listing their strengths and human weaknesses, among them the difficulty of making a head shot for modern soldiers and morale. How our weapons and tactics developed to fight humans, not the undead. How we break, while they don't, ever...
- Max Brooks' next effort, World War Z, takes Earth, chapter by chapter, from "Patient Zero" to Zombie Apocalypse and back again through the titular war, described through a series of fictitious interviews. Interviews conducted by Max Brooks, no less, an Author Avatar; memorably, when the Zombie Survival Guide is mentioned, and criticized, the "interviewer" says "Oh really?"
- The zombies decompose differently based on what part of the world they're in and what sort of things they encounter. Broken bones don't heal, but the zombie drags it along with them, and that wears away the dragging bits. Hot, humid weather will speed the decay. Cold enough weather will freeze them solid and stop further decay until the thaw, which will speed the decay again.
- The Discworld novels don't follow any of the above rules. Their zombies are completely sentient, and generally maintain their old personalities to every extent. They are basically powered by their will to live; a person who becomes a zombie is generally much stronger than they used to be, being unburdened by all the creakiness of their old body. (Although, if it's not properly preserved, it'll fall to bits, and many zombies are covered in stitches.)
- It should be noted that zombies do not exist in great numbers on Discworld and they're not considered a problem by the living population, although there are prejudices. The novels have featured three zombies as main or recurring characters:
- 1) Reginald Shoe, a former romantic revolutionary, who after his death in the Ankh-Morpork civil war thirty years prior to the present time became a mortuary worker and fervent Death Rights activist and later-on the first (and so far only) zombie recruit of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. He is a highly valued policeman, known for his calm and laconic humour. To quote Watch Commander Vimes, Reg Shoe was a man born to be dead.
- 2) The wizard Windle Poons, who, after his death aged 130 years old became a zombie due to the fact that Death was temporarily not available to take away Poon's soul. The undead Poons had more fun during the couple of days spent as a zombie than during the 100 years prior.
- 3) Mr. Slant, a lawyer and president of the Guild of Lawyers. Has no discernible sense of humour. In fact, it is said that the only change death had on Mr. Slant was that he started working through his lunch break.
- Zombies in Piers Anthony's Xanth are much the same, although they deteriorate more; many suffer from brain-damage as their grey matter rots away.
- Xanth zombies are mostly benign, although zombies are called to fight several times and make fearsome opponents, and not contagious, they result either from the occasional person with unfinished business or from a corpse reanimated by the Zombie Master.
- The Dresden Files pretty much skewers the idea of the Hollywood horror movie zombie, with Harry himself asking why someone would go to the trouble of working intricate dark magics just to get something that shuffles like an arthritic grandmother and thinks of nothing but brains. The zombies of the Dresdenverse are pumped full of dark magic to the point that they're stronger and faster than the average human, as well as completely pliant to the will of the necromancer that raised them... provided they maintain the spell, of course.
- In the Anita Blake series zombies have to be animated by someone with the power to do so. They are obedient to the person who raised them, and have a varied amount of memory and personality depending on time passed since death, power level of the animator, and quality of blood sacrifice that raised them. Eating flesh will prevent them from decaying as rapidly, but an ordinary competently raised zombie is unlikely to go on a rampage unless they are a murder victim or used to be an animator themselves. The titual character's day job (well, night job) is as a zombie reanimator.
- In the Stephen King short story "Home Delivery", an object orbiting the Earth (either an asteroid covered with seriously weird worm-like creatures, or it's worms all the way down..) is somehow causing the dead to reanimate. The story was originally published in a collection of Romero homages called The Book of the Dead.
- Similarly, Cell, another King zombie novel, takes a different approach - a cell phone signal wipes out anyone exposed to it of their memories, social restraint, and anything that makes them human, and makes them extremely violent to the point that the Twenty-Eight Series zombies look like bunny rabbits. Billions kill each other within seconds.
- This is a rare example where the newly-minted zombies attack everybody, including each other. At least at first..
- David Moody's Autumn series is somewhat novel in its setup: the story begins with 99% of the world population dying -- in the following weeks, some of the victims get better. The most novel aspect of his approach is that for the majority of the first book, the zombies are benign, just wandering about at random, with the result that we can see that "Holy crap, dead people are getting up and walking around," is really freaking scary entirely independent of the possibility of being eaten by a zombie. Of course, at the end, the zombies do become violent, and the whole thing just slips into the mold of the standard survivalist zombie apocalypse story.
Western Animation
- One of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episodes involved Bart getting a book from the "Occult Section" of the school library and attempting to reanimate deceased family cat Snowball I with it; he accidentally reanimates the human graveyard instead.
- Doctor Who, though very little of their demeanor is like the classic Zombie, the transformed people from the episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" have been called Gas-Mask Zombies. The walking corpses in "The Unquiet Dead" are closer, but they are actually hosts for the ghost-like aliens called the Gelth.
- Although the entire incident was a prank, in a Halloween episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the "zombies" seem to follow Romero Rules (if you excuse their cry for brains); Mr. Herriman is "killed" and returns as a zombie soon after, a zombie bite turns someone else into a zombie, etc.
- Mighty Max had an episode where Max had to travel to Haiti to help his mother investigate the strange behavior of the locals. They had a Zombie Gait and pretty strong. But they were possessed by slug-like symbiotes (you could kill the slug to free the victim) and tried to attach more slugs to make more "zombies." Eventually Max finds a hive full of 'em and kills the Queen slug. The victims were fully aware of what they were doing, a unique trait for these zombies.
Video Games
- Probably at least 50% of the Survival Horror genre.
- Ur-example: The earlier Resident Evil games.
- House Of The Dead, though in this case the zombies don't infect others, and it isn't entirely explained how they are all created, only that they are made through Curien's scientific discoveries and possibly by computer through factories (which wouldn't explain their clothes).
- Dead Rising
- Siren - these are particularly notable, as they retain their intelligence in the form of a hive mind, and memories of their former life, and although they become murderous and gradually lose the ability to speak language intelligible to humans, they constantly try to re-enact their living life; as the game was first released in Japan in 2003, and EU and US in '04, this actually predates the use of this concept in Land of the Dead, although not the precursors to it seen in Day of the Dead.
- It's also common in the First Person Shooter genre, where it fills the "people you can shoot at without feeling bad about it" niche.
- Both Doom and Quake, in both cases supernatural (and in neither case the main threat to humanity). In the former game, the zombies were basically undead foot soldiers (a few pistol shots would do one in permanently), still using the firearms they had been carrying in life (though Doom 3 introduced more regular walking corpses; which were originally intended to keep getting up as long as their corpse was intact, as revealed in a leaked beta; this was dropped from the final version because the Ragdoll Physics added to their deaths made it impractical). In the latter the zombies were shambling long-dead corpses in the Russo mould (nothing short of dismembering them with explosives would keep them down), though much more easily killed "grunts" more like the Doom zombies were found in the early levels of each episode (these may well have been still living, but possessed or otherwise mind-controlled). The Wolfenstein 3D games also had re-animated corpses as enemies, these created by Nazi Mad Science.
- The Doom novelization had especially creepy scenes where zombies, still bearing an imprint of their former lives, would mindlessly shamble to the grocery store, pulling rotting food from the shelves, walking past the cash register, and so on.
- Halo, in which The Virus can reanimate dead bodies to spread itself.
- The third game also has a multiplayer mode where someone is "infected" and spreads it by killing people with the energy sword, and they come back to do the same. Eventually, you have a few regular people left heading for the high ground to snipe as much as they can before being overwhelmed.
- Methinks Counter-Strike had an influence on this, where the most favored zombie mode, Infection, has the opposing side as fast-running zombies, and the other as C Ts/Ts. Whoever is hit by a zombie is turned into one, and so on.
- The Time Splitters games are rather fond of zombies, and gives them amusing names like Gilbert Gastric, Daisy Dismay, and Mr. Fleshcage. The third game even had them quote a recurring line from Shaun of the Dead as a tribute, because Time Splitters 2 had a cameo in the film (as the FPS game that Ed and Shaun play).
- Blood, a game basically created around horror movie tropes, had its fair share of zombies (the tougher variety's appearance directly cribbed from Romero's Night of the Living Dead). In the sequel, living dead were replaced by people taken over by supernatural wormlike parasitic beings.
- The MMORPG Urban Dead
 .
- Unlike other examples, the zombies in this game are highly intelligent since they are controlled by players. While they do have a limited vocabulary, zombie players have come up with creative ways of in-game communication. And that's not even counting the Metagame on the forums.
- If one counts the RP, they're also highly mutated, undying, and God help us if they break from the quarantine. To be fair, a lot are stil Romero-style mind shamblers from the early, "official" player created story.
- The game Overlord features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead. In a twist keeping with its tone and sense of humor, it's caused by the proximity of a slutty, disease-ridden Succubus Queen; apparently, what's a harmless STD to a demoness is a virulent Zombie Apocalypse-inducing epidemic for humans.
- The game The Sims 2 has zombies (introduced in one of the expansions). Their "thought bubble" tends to contain a brain. In the game, they only appear if they are created on purpose by the player. A mod on one of the most popular modding sites, MATY, changes their behavior so that they will fight and infect other characters in the game. The mod, aptly enough, is called Zombie Apocalypse.
- The grunt troops of the Scourge in Warcraft III and World Of Warcraft are all zombies, reanimated by the Lich King or his necromancers. In ''Warcraft III', most of them are infected by contaminated food supplies rather than being killed by other zombies.
- As the title character of Stubbs The Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, you get to play a zombie, bringing terror to the Zeerust utopia of Punchbowl.
- Don't forget Possesion, which, in addition to being able to lead a variety of zombies (slow, fast, intelligent, mutated, you name it) has the main character as a seintient zombie unleashing chaos on a corporate-controlled city.
- The various games in the Half Life series all have Zombies and headcrabs (which turn people into zombies). In this game, again, unless you immolate or seriously damage the body or kill the headcrab the zombie keeps on going. If you hit the body wrong, you can kill the zombie but leave the headcrab alive, which has a long jump as well as a crawl. Or the zombie's body is cut in half, and the torso continues to crawl at you. There is also a Zombine, which is a fast zombie that has a grenade he can either set off as a suicide bomber when near you, or throw it at you.
- I have never seen a Zombine throw a grenade. I think they've forgotten how to.
- Most RPGs that involve dungeon-crawling will have some sort of zombies as a monster, usually found in the creepy Dark Temple/haunted house/graveyard setting. They may induce status effects, but are basically treated like any other monster in this case.
- The CRPG Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines set in The World Of Darkness features a mission called "You Only Die Once a Night" where the Hollywood graveyard caretaker Romero (!) asks you to keep hordes of mindless zombies from breaking out of the cemetery. Even though you only have to hold them off for five minutes, this troper has never been able to beat the mission.
- There's also an earlier mission where you have to track down and kill the members of a cult of vampires that deliberately infects their meals with a horrible virus. You have to fight your way through a horde of zombies before you can take the last one on.
- Metal Gear Solid 4. Well, not exactly, but half-way through the game, when Liquid represses the Mercenary Army's nanomachines, causing their emotion and reason to flood back into their brain, the PM Cs in the area are brain damaged. Guess what? They shamble, moan, and are pretty much Classic-Romero zombies, to the point of mindlessly rushing Snake (and not reacting to any sort of stimuli). There's no biting or undead stuff, though.
- Space Quest V has the mutant Pukoids fulfilling this trope.
- In the Japanese PS2 game The Zombie vs. Kyuukyuusha ("Zombie vs. Ambulance", and yes that's the real title), you drive around a zombie-infested city in an ambulance, attempting to rescue people and take them back to the hospital that serves as your home base so you can inoculate them against the zombie plague. If you take too long getting people back to base, they turn into zombies and start damaging your ambulance from the inside. And you can upgrade your ambulance so it can take more damage and more easily plow through hordes of zombies. Again, I Am Not Making This Up.
- This game is part of the "Simple 2000" series of budget titles, which also features a game called "The Oneechanbara" ("Zombie Zone" in the West), in which you play a bikini-wearing samurai girl who goes around slicing up zombies. And no, I'm definitely not making that up. While the gameplay isn't particularly brilliant, the game is definitely fun. It's proven so popular that sequels have been released on the Wii and X Box 360, and there's even a movie.
- Final Fantasy XI has the Qutrub, which are actually people who have fallen to the Lamia who willingly turn themselves into zombies. They are noted for being extra-weak to all damage, yet also have far more HP than most other enemies.
- Battle For Wesnoth's Walking Corpses, and their level-up, the Soullesses. They follow the Russo rules, for the most part: any unit killed by a Walking Corpse or Soulless becomes a Walking Corpse or Soulless on the side of the Corpse that killed them, simulating The Virus.
- Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend features Mad Cow Tourettes zombies (apparently Tourette's syndrome sufferers who ate mad cow-infected meat). They normally shamble slowly, but can sometimes be seen stumbling forwards quickly (catching the player off-guard); they throw chunks of their own flesh to attack; their heads must be completely destroyed to kill them (merely cutting them off will do no good); and (for no other reason than the fact that the world of Postal 2 is already messed up as it is) you can ressurect dead zombies by pissing on them.
- A new MMO currently in Beta, Dead Frontier, takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse with the player as one of a handful of survivors who must constantly make supply runs into the city, which has been overrun by zombies of many shapes, sizes and speeds, to procure food, medical supplies, new weapons and ammunition. It's important to note that most everyone has a place in the new society, such as doctors, engineers and even chefs, and those who try to go it alone may find themselves as zombie food more often than they'd like.
- The story-heavy First-Person-Shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl, the 2007 hit on the European video game market, features survival-horror fighting various kinds of mutants and zombies in the depopulated contaminated fall-out zone around the old Ukrainian nuclear power plant (the place of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986). In the game, the sealed-off reactor suffered a second explosion in 2006, after which the military sealed off the whole region. So-called "STALKERS" (Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer and Robber) illegally explore the area, hunting for artifacts among the ruins or bring back samples for scientists.
- City Of Heroes is holding a Zombie Apocalypse for its 2008 Halloween Event.
- An infinite number of zombies usually appears early on in Castlevania games. Fortunately they're much easier to kill than the average movie zombie.
New Media
Web Comics
- Last Blood online comics with one hand plays along with this trope and with other hand subverts it. While that world, indeed, had experienced Zombie Apocalypse and majority of zombies are near mindless, brain-hungry creatures, the First Zombie was, in fact, a vampire, who starved for too long, and completely retained his intelligence after transformation. This is also true for any other vampire-turned-zombie but not for their zombie "children".
- Sluggy Freelance gives quite elegant and reasonable-looking explanation why zombie must eat brains (and other organs as well): as dead corpses zombies are decomposing all time but able to regenerate eaten parts. So if zombie want to keep his intellegence it simply must eat brains.
- According to the Demononlogy page in DMFA, one becomes undead only if they die within 24 hours of receiving a scratch or bite from an undead creature. This implies that the wound itself is not automatically fatal, and that if one died more than 24 hours after receiving it they will stay dead.
Other
- For their April Fools 2008 issue, The University at Buffalo's Spectrum college newspaper reported, among other things, about the emergence of the Necro-Animatory Syndrome virus, and the rise of the ambulatory dead("zombie" being an "outdated and offensive term," though Bush is quoted as nearly using it) out of Cape Canaveral, where the NAS virus had apparently come back with a space shuttle crew. Articles included general information, survival guide, how to recognize an NAS sufferer(not very hard), and what to do if you're bitten(die with dignity, and with a friend to take you out immediately).
- The Humans vs Zombies massively multiplayer live-action tag game.
- Xombie is a series of animated web shorts, trade paperbacks, and web comics that deals with the war between xombies, zombies, and humans. The schtick is that zombies are your average, run-of-the-mill reanimated dead, whilst xombies are corpses that retain their former intelligence, gain enhanced physical strength, some kind of crazy weapon, and high Animal Empathy. The original shorts revolved around the xombie Dirge and his dog Cerberus protecting a young girl (Zoe), on her way to the last human settlement.
- The Tabletop Role Playing Game All Flesh Must Be Eaten is all about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, with a variety of different Apocalypses in different settings (called "Deadworlds").
- This fake BBC article claimed that a Zombie Outbreak had occurred in Cambodia and was hushed up by the government. It was debunked on Snopes.com but is still passed around from time to time.
Real Life
- Zombie Squad is a disaster-preparedness group that uses the metaphor of a Zombie Apocalypse to encourage people to prepare for real-life emergencies, on the principle that if you are ready for the dead to rise from their graves and devour the living, you are ready for anything.
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